How to Avoid the #1 Fatal Mistake Made by Web Site Owners

I’m sure you’ve seen or at least heard about Kevin Costner’s movie, Field of Dreams. The line that I always remember is “If you build it, they will come.”   Kevin’s character had this wild dream about building a baseball park out in the middle of an Iowa cornfield. Most people thought he was nuts but those who had faith in him encouraged him by telling him that if he built it, the people would come.

Well, naturally, by the end of the movie you see lines of cars as far as the eye can see, streaming in to his cornfield.

Unfortunately, that’s Hollywood. In the real world though, many people have been taken with the mystery and excitement that surrounds the Internet in much the same way.

The vast majority of Web site owners have approached their sites with twinkles in their eyes, and high hopes that all they’d have to do is build the site and the people would come.

I’d venture to guess that you too, have at one time or another had dreams that your site would be the ticket to financial freedom. After all, why not? There are millions, if not billions of people out there that you could now reach and who could be potential customers.

You figured that if you only had a site on the Web, then you’d start seeing orders roll in the door.

Do you remember that IBM commercial from a couple years ago? The one where everyone was standing around one computer as their brand-new site went online for the first time? Within a couple seconds an order rolled in.  Then 10. Then 100,000. Did you have dreams like that?

So what’s wrong with your site? Why does it sit out there day in and day out and never make the phone actually ring.  Why do the online orders never come through?  It’s traffic, I’d suspect. Or lack of traffic, to be specific.

So you see, this myth that people will start flooding your site the moment you stick your site out there on the Web, has been responsible for many dashed dreams. If you take a look at your traffic stats, that your hosting provider can show you, you’ll probably see that your site is not actually getting any traffic, aside from the regular hits made by you, as you check on the site to see if it’s still working.

So what’s the #1 Fatal Mistake that Web site owners make? They don’t actually promote their site once it’s up on the Web. They sit waiting with crossed fingers hoping that somehow customers will magically find it.

They don’t!!

The Web is a complicated series of billions of files housed on millions of different servers. If you expect that your files are going to stand out from the rest and that your site will suddenly be the one that gets all of the traffic, you’re dead wrong. It takes effort.  I’m not going to lie to you. It just doesn’t happen. Successful sites are successful because their owners have taken the time to make them great. They have taken the time to promote them and get lots of people to visit them.

You have a very valuable asset sitting out there, but it’s going to waste if you don’t use it. It’s like a full time sales person who is waiting to tell the world about your products or services, 24/7. And the best part…he won’t ever charge you a commission.

But this sales person isn’t able to knock on doors, or make phone calls.  He just waits for people to come to him, and when they do, he does his job.

So your job is to send people to him.   How do you do that?   Well, that’s a topic for another report.   If you’re interested in finding out how to drive tons of qualified leads to your site, then be sure to give us a call.